Wish upon the Stars chapter 872

I considered during the trip what to do with my wishes, and I came to the decision that I was growing too fast. I’d get the stats and renown eventually, but for now, I really needed to learn to actually use my new abilities, and even my old ones. I stockpiled my scrolls and suppressed my stats as we traveled, and put in the effort training with all of my forms during the trip.

The Ten Demons tree was used to refine each of my forms, slowly polishing and improving them. I saw a marked improvement in each, though nothing as astonishing as the one Belial had shown. My first form had been created back when I knew very little about being an Ascendant, and I’d left a lot of potential untapped. The rest of them I had a better handle on, and my improvements were more quantitative than qualitative with them.

Still, five months of travel meant five months of scrolls, giving me a whopping twelve hundred of the damned things.

The training had been effective for more than just me, though. Everyone was getting in their last minute polishes on their strength. Benny, Abel, Bethy, Jessie, Callie, even my sister had been training hard in preparation for the succession war, and frankly, the resources we had available to us made it an effective stretch of time for our growth.

Benny had been training with Sebastian, the necromantic aide de camp of Morgan Lark, whose mad scientist like approach to corpse construction had some symbolic similarities to his own power. He’d officially broken through to D-rank after quite a bit of work (what that work WAS I had no idea, Sebastian would take him on trips and they’d vanish for days and then meet back up with the ship), and was getting pretty scary.

Abel was training with Bethy, whose grasp on using blood energy was much more intuitive than his own. He’d confided in me that she was a great teacher, though her insistence on coming up with a dizzying array of A themed fake names for him was exhausting. He was starting to forget his actual name.

Callie was training with my mother, but also with Mel. While learning from high rankers was effective, the other fire used had spent quite some time polishing her abilities at a lower rank, and had more than a few helpful insights.

Jessie had broken through to D-rank pretty easily, but had spent most of the time bonding with her brother. Now that Alan was back, I could see a weight lifted off my friend’s shoulders that I hadn’t even known was there. She was constantly smiling, constantly energetic, and she would make trips around the ship, topping up people’s energy while she showed Alan around, generally spreading good cheer and her own reputation.

That was one unique thing about healers. Combatants had trouble building rep outside of combat, with no dynamic action to take. Someone like Jessie, meanwhile, could just recharge everyone during their own training and her reputation grew by the day.

Bethy had been coming back for treatments alongside my cousin Felicity, who was, at this point, mostly completely healed. The C-ranker was still quiet and withdrawn, but now it was more companionable silence than traumatized blankness. What really threw me was that she had started spending a ton of time with Cark, and had bonded deeply with Cassidy. The three of them were inseparable, though no one was really willing to ask if they were romantically involved, since we were just happy to see her opening up to someone and didn’t want to ruin it.

With the approach to the Heirworld coming up though, we’d all decided to meet to summarize our gains, and what better way to do that than a big family dinner.

“This is so good!” My wife groaned as she scarfed down another sandwich. “Why haven’t you made this before?”

I rolled my eyes, making myself a sandwich. I’d slow roasted some beef with homemade gravy, and we were all making sandwiches with it, just cut open the bun and slap some cheese on there (always apply cheese first to seal the gravy so the bread doesn’t get soggy). I’d made a huge pot of the stuff, and even then it was a little tight, even with just the main group around to share with.

Cooking for large groups was a much different activity than making a meal for a few people, and I didn’t have much practice at it. I just shrugged. “Hard to feed so many. It did turn out good though, huh?”

I’d actually tried something a little different. Namely, I’d prepared C-ranked meat this time. Aside from the slow cook, I’d also used my poison fire to tenderize the meat (it had taken a week, and I’d had to use a VERY low level of power to do it right). It had been a huge pain, but it was such an ordeal, that, combined with all my previous progress and accumulation, over the course of this trip I’d hit Master in cooking.

Taking a big bite of the sandwich, I hummed with contentment. It really was fantastic. I’d cheated horrendously during prep, using Dantalion to thoroughly identify every aspect of my ingredients and to monitor the tenderizing process, but it had definitely been worth it.

“So, Attic Bat,” I asked my wife’s former mentor. “How have you been adjusting?”

The tall, thin man was even twitchier than I had guessed when I’d seen his body so long ago. His eyes flicked around the room constantly, and last I’d heard he’d holed up in a boiler room on the lower levels of the ship. Being underground made him more comfortable, according to Callie. The fact that we were in space didn’t seem to matter, so I just left him to do his thing, offering whatever help I could.

He blinked far too much, and had a tendency to take a split second longer to respond to questions than most people, but he was generally a pretty polite and cheerful guy, if a bit nervous. “Oh?” he asked with a blink. “Adjusting? Yes. Adjustments. Many things to adjust to.”

I’d been worried we might have messed something up bringing him back, causing some kind of trauma, but Callie had assured me he was just like that. Alan had been much less thrown by the whole experience, though he was having his own difficulties. Namely, the fact that his precious baby sister was now MUCH stronger than he was, and had her own life and friends he didn’t know for the most part.

Jessie didn’t begrudge him the attempts at protectiveness, bringing him everywhere and happily letting him pretend she wasn’t basically his bodyguard. I glanced over to where he was sitting, digging into his own food with relish (the adjective not the substance, I’d have lost my mind).

“So, how is everyone’s training going?” I glanced around, especially at my B-rankers. “Crell, you’ve been training with my uncle, right? How is it?”

“I’m blown away,” he admitted unwillingly. “I’ve never met anyone so tricky or deceitful. I’ve learned so much. He knows things about my abilities even I don’t know. I’d already trained up to the peak of Legendary in my time in the dungeon. I feel like with so much new information, I might be able to break Mythic soon.”

I beamed at him. “That’s amazing! Oh, also, weird question, what IS your ability? You can’t rank a main Skill up past your current rank, so Doubt has to be secondary, right? What’s your primary ability?”

“I was wondering about that, actually,” Benny cut in. “You need to merge your Solid Path with your main Skill to condense a Chronicle, right? But you used the Chronicle as the foundation of your current Legendary Skill at C-rank, right? How could you do both at the same time? Don’t those conflict?”

I shook my head, fielding this one. “Same logic as my pseudo domains. The Chronicle provides a foundation to withstand the soul weight of the higher ranked Skill, but it doesn’t need to be the basis of it. It’s more of a bar for entry than a required element.”

Theoretically, that meant I could rank one of my non main Skills up past Master, but the amount of time and effort needed to hone one to that level was prohibitive, considering everything I had going on. Still, knowing that Crell might be able to hit Mythic with Doubt was a big boost to my confidence. It wasn’t exactly the same as having an extra A-ranker, but it would definitely give us an edge. There might not be any other upranked Ascendants in any of the other factions.

Unfortunately, Crell was the only one likely to be capable of that feat. Carmichael and Alanna were my only other two who had ranked up a Skill in C-rank, and neither of them had been at Legendary long enough to push it to the peak before breaking through.

Naturally, all that talk about his Skill breaking through to Mythic had us all excited and anxious to see what he could do. We finished eating quickly before heading for a training room where we could see what he was capable of. Naturally, in order to best show off his Skills he needed to fight another B-ranker. Rather than a newbie, I asked Heather, Daysia’s mother, to face him, and she seemed more than happy to have a chance to test her Skills.

The two of them were eager to fight, so we kicked off the battle pretty quick, and Daysia seemed thrilled to have a chance to watch her mother work. Heather was a powerful Dryad, having a bond with her B-rank tree that acted a lot like my bond with Callie.

To my shock, when the battle started, she manifested a kid of…tree shadow behind her. It reminded me of the one inside my soul, but she was able to physically interact with the world with it, which was incredibly fascinating to watch. Honestly, a lot of it probably went over my head. I’d watched high level fights before, but watching this one I’d activated Dantalion, and I realized pretty quickly that there was a LOT going on that I couldn’t see.

Every blow seemed to be infused with meaning and weight that I could only vaguely recognize. Maybe it was mythology, or some embryonic form of domain, or even the same essence of willpower I used myself, just in a higher form that was hard to recognize, but the longer I watched, the more entranced I became.

Sadly, the battle didn’t last as long as I might have liked. I actually missed a lot of it by focusing so hard. Overlooking the forest for the trees, so to speak. Still, I caught some of the proceedings, and seeing Crell talk Heather in circles and slowly divert her attacks was impressive. Once it ended though, everyone wanted to go next and show off the results of their training.

While that sounded fun, we needed a scale of progress, not individual combat assessments, so I shut it down. Most of our party got bored and went back to the dinner to keep eating all my food. I specifically stopped Callie, Jessie, and Benny though.

 “We can all spar later, but for now, I want to check in with the team.” I told them eagerly. “Which means it’s share time ladies and gentlemen. Adjust your condition and accept your stats, because once we’re all settled up, I want to see your stat sheets.”

Five months of training would make a huge difference for all of us. I was excited to see exactly how far I’d gone myself, and checking on my wife’s progress after her new trait was a must, not to mention seeing how Benny and Jessie were doing in D-rank. I was pretty sure none of them were going to disappoint me.